How to rebuild the icon cache in Windows systems.

If one or more of your icons are not displaying correctly, or that your icon cache is corrupted, then you might consider rebuilding the icon cache to reset and reload the icon images into the icon cache (the solution works on Windows 7 and Windows 8).

By the way – the icon cache is located at the hidden system folder location below:

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\IconCache.db

This solution will not help with any of the following icon issues:
1. A shortcut’s icon that is not displayed properly due to the source of the shortcut being moved or deleted. You may need to recreate a new shortcut directly from the source (ex: program’s exe) file to replace it instead.
2. All icons for a specific file extension display the wrong icon. This may be do to setting the wrong association for what program to open the file extension instead. You can restore the default file extension’s associations to fix this icon instead.

To manually rebuild the icon cache using the command prompt you have to:
1. Close and save anything that you are working on (the following commands will kill explorer and restart the computer when completed).
2. Open a command prompt in Windows 7 or Windows 8.
3. In the command prompt, copy and paste each command line below exactly as is one at a time and press enter after each command:

ie4uinit.exe -ClearIconCache
taskkill /IM explorer.exe /F
DEL "%localappdata%\IconCache.db" /A
shutdown /r /f /t 00

4. After restarting the computer, the IconCache.db file has been rebuilt and all missing icons should display correctly.